The Campbell Academy Blog (96)

Easing down?

I was on my bike this morning (Friday).

It was a tough bike ride because I'd been to Gregor to do my PT training at six o'clock this morning after I had been yesterday. I couldn't do Tuesday because I was away in Nice.

It meant that my legs were wrecked, and I got home from Gregor, walked the dogs, saw Alison on her way out to do her thing, and fell asleep on the couch for 15 minutes at about 8.15 after Callum had gone to school.

I woke up about 8.30-8.35 and decided to haul my ass upstairs, put my bike gear on, and get out for a bike.

I was only planning to do 90 minutes today (I'm trying to do five hours tomorrow), but it was as hard as hard could be getting my legs to spin around with my terribly painful, horribly sore glutes after the training I'd done yesterday with Gregor.

I pushed myself around a 90-minute bike ride and up several hills and started feeling better as I returned.

But as I was cycling back in, just getting to the end of the ride, I realised I had a tonne of work to do today, and I started to get that tiny little anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach, thinking I wasn't up to date with the things I should be up to date with.

Then I thought about my friend, a really good friend of mine who I've known for a long time and who's been retired for 11 years (he retired really young).

He's in the first week of his new job, aged 61, fixing bikes for three days a week at a national bake retailer. Building bikes that come in boxes from the Far East to be sent out as online sales.

He needs something to do.

His job before this was high-powered and, I guess, pretty stressful, but he gave it up 11 years ago and, by his own admission, has been floundering around for the last few years, wondering what to do.

Your garden can only look so lovely; your allotment can only bear so much fruit.

And so, he created a new phase of his life where he went on to get another job, working for someone else in a different field, fixing as many bikes as he could in one day, three days a week on the days that he didn't actually want to work.

And so, as this thought went through my mind as I cycled through Ruddington on the way back to the house, I realised that I could stop whenever I wanted.

Just stopping now and then returning from my bike rides would give me the ability just to go for a shower and eat some toast and peanut butter and jam (my preferred after-bike snack) and fall asleep on the couch with my dogs for the rest of the day, maybe read a book and then watch Netflix tonight.

I would be able to do that for a little while and find contentment in it, and then I wouldn't and then I would be looking for another job.

One that stimulated me, one that stressed me a little bit, one that asked questions of me that I don't know whether I can answer or not, and that would give me extraordinary joy when I managed to answer at least one or two.

Maybe a job that allowed me to raise other people up to be the best versions of themselves and to make a go of things that they didn't think they could make a go of.

Then I realised I already had that job and there was no point in taking a gap now.

I have the best job in the world.

I am one of the luckiest people on the planet.

It's not time for me to slow down.

It's time for me to speed up.